Israel’s Housing Protest

In recent weeks, Israelis have been taking to the streets to protest the rising cost of housing in Tel Aviv and its suburbs. On a typical summer day, Rothschild Boulevard, one of the most upscale streets in Tel Aviv, is bustling with Ray Ban-wearing couples pushing high-end Bugaboo strollers. Lately it’s been lined with tents.

Middle-class Israelis from across the political spectrum are coming to the improvised tent site to protest what they consider government indifference to the unsustainable cost of living in Tel Aviv. A “rally for affordable living” brought more than twenty thousand people to the streets of Tel Aviv, holding signs that read, “I’ve had enough.” The face of the movement is Daphni Leef, a twenty-six-year-old film student from Tel Aviv, who first set up a tent on Rothschild after looking for an apartment in Tel Aviv and realizing that she couldn’t afford any of those available. Initially, the police refused to grant her a permit to set up her tent, but they relinquished after she came back with a television news crew. “I’ve had it,” she wrote on Facebook, and invited everyone who felt the same to come to Rothschild. That night, she was joined by more than a hundred people, and the number has been growing ever since.

Some politicians from the governing Likud party have accused her of serving as a mouthpiece for the left; others denounced the protest as catering to spoiled millennials. Leef herself is the daughter of the globally acclaimed composer Yinam Leef, but she becomes agitated when she addresses her own background or that of those who join her in protest. “This protest is a-partisan, a-gender, a-everything,” Leef told me. “Anyone who tries to narrow it is either afraid or has been misled by the media.”

Tent dwellers aren’t saying they can’t afford to get by, just that they can’t afford to live in the city. And the protesters contend that Israel has no Brooklyn or Scarsdale equivalent. One of them, Shlomo Krauss, criticized the outskirts of Israel for “their dubious infrastructure, failing public transportation and zero employment opportunities” in a widely circulated op-ed laying out the protesters’ gripes, with the headline, “Don’t call us spoiled.”

By “outskirts” Israelis typically refer to the small towns just outside of the Tel Aviv area, such as Holon, Petah Tikvah, and Kfar Saba. There is also the so-called “periphery”; namely, the Galilee in the north and the Negev in the south—areas ridden with poverty and inadequate transportation. The Israeli settlements are a housing subgroup of their own, and one that the majority of the protesters don’t want to live in, despite the economic incentives.

For years, people in Israel have been talking about a housing bubble. Yet, to the protesters, housing is only a symbol of other burdens they see the middle class as shouldering, along with disproportionate income tax, the rising costs of goods, and growing inequality gaps. In fact, the housing protest came in the wake of a highly successful consumer boycott on dairy companies to protest the price of cottage cheese—a staple food—and was accompanied yesterday by a “stroller protest” (pictured above) of thousands of parents marching with their children to demand more affordable education for preschoolers, longer maternity leave, and lower costs for baby essentials, such as diapers and milk formula.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested a plan Monday that would see the construction of ten thousand new housing units and give economic incentives for students, the protesters refused to accept it. “We’re talking about affordable prices for everyone, and he’s talking about a solution for students?” Leef told me. “I’m sorry that the Prime Minister is so obtuse.”

Netanyahu seems to be at a loss for how to respond. “Give me ideas for a solution,” Netanyahu he told his ministers on Sunday, according to Haaretz, as the protest spread into Jerusalem with hundreds of demonstrators blocking entrance to the buildings of government. Netanyahu managed to fend off President Barack Obama’s call for Israel to resume peace negotiations with the Palestinians—negotiations that have essentially come to a standstill during his tenure. But now it’s not the Americans or the Israeli left wing that Netanyahu needs to appease; it’s the country’s middle class.